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Why minorities are more resilient to hardship than whites

While poor black and Latino Americans face hardships equivalent to or worse than their white peers, minority Americans seem better equipped to cope with those problems -- especially in certain parts of the country.

EXCHANGE-EMERGENCY SHELTER
DALLAS -- Carol Gordon, second from right, hugs Teresa D., right, while Kristie Loveland, left, hugs Florence Graves, second from left, during a group session at the Austin Street Center's women's day resource program called "The Sisterhood" on Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at Austin Street Center in Dallas. The program addresses the challenges of homeless women. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News)(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

We're living in a divided country, separated from our fellow citizens by income, race, education and worldview.

But here's a fascinating detail: While poor black and Latino Americans face hardships equivalent to or worse than their white peers, minority Americans seem better equipped to cope with those problems -- especially in certain parts of the country.

Carol Graham's recent report for the Brookings Institution, "The Geography of Desperation in America," continues her investigation into diversity, resilience and optimism in the face of poverty. It finds significant differences among U.S. states in terms of how its lowest-income citizens feel, which can translate to differences in how -- and even how long -- they live.

Before we talk about the impact of place, I want to talk about what you've learned about the differences in experience among poor Americans depending on race. First of all, what counts as poor for purposes of this research?

We use the Gallup poll data; I'm an adviser at Gallup and, therefore, have access to the data. It's a very detailed data set on a thousand Americans a day from 2008 through today, so it's very large. It includes extensive income data, and we define poverty as the lowest fifth of the distribution, which is about $24,000 a year for a household of four. This, in turn, corresponds very closely with the official U.S. poverty line. So, poverty in our data corresponds roughly with official measures.

What led you to believe there might be differences by race in how resilient groups of Americans would be?

I'm originally from Latin America, and I've done a ton of work on poor people and poor countries around the world. It struck me that the poor in the U.S. were significantly more stressed than the poor in Latin America. They were significantly less likely to smile in a day, which is just a measure of positive affect or mood. The most striking finding was that they were significantly less likely to believe that hard work would get them ahead. The difference between the rich and the poor on that question is 20 times greater in the U.S. than it is in Latin America. In other words, the gap is that much bigger when you compare the gaps between rich and poor in the U.S. and rich and poor in Latin America.

It really struck me that my hunch about being very divided played out not only in incomes and opportunities but in attitudes and in well-being. It really struck me that there was something to this. So, I decided to go into detail on how this differed across poor groups in the U.S. -- poor blacks, poor whites, and poor Hispanics being the main groups. Not to ignore other groups, but it's just what was feasible technically.

It was about the time of the Ferguson riots and the Baltimore riots, so this is mid-2015. It was a time of a lot of concern about the state of the African-American community, police violence issues and other things. So, I went into this expecting that I'd probably get high levels of optimism among poor Hispanics. I'm from Latin America, and Latin Americans always score higher than their incomes would predict on most well-being metrics. I thought I'd get a neutral on poor whites and a sort of negative, in comparison, on optimism for poor blacks. Instead, I got absolutely the opposite findings. The most positive of all the poor groups by far were poor blacks. The second most positive were poor Hispanics, and very, very far behind were poor whites.

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I was initially puzzled, and I checked the data as you usually do when you get a finding that's unusual. Around the same time, the data on premature mortality came out (based on CDC data) showing that our mortality is being driven up by preventable deaths among middle-aged, uneducated whites. That was a first take on that mortality story, and I realized that the mortality data and my data were telling a very similar story about surprising levels of desperation and lack of hope among poor whites. Since then, I've looked very closely in two ways. One, trying to understand high levels of minority resilience ... but also in terms of what was going on with poor whites -- links to the opioid crisis and all kinds of other things.

I want to talk just a little bit more about hope, because optimism might sound like a nice thing to have, but it's not necessarily vital to a decent life. You point out that you're not likely to invest in your future -- in the form of taking care of your health or getting an education or going for that extra bit of job training -- if you believe things are unlikely to get better no matter what you do.

Absolutely, and I found this pattern in the early days of when we were using well-being metrics and studying life satisfaction and happiness in the early 2000s. People who believed in their future -- who were optimistic about their future mobility -- were much more likely to invest in their health, invest in the labor market, and invest in their education and, bingo, they did better. Since then, that work has been confirmed by experiments on twins and all kinds of things like health studies and longevity studies. So, people who have higher levels of well-being and who are more optimistic not only live longer, but they tend to do better.

One of the things that is striking about this data is that the variable that most closely links in the mortality rate patterns is lack of hope. Stress is also a definite marker of ill-being, and it also links to the mortality rate data. But, lack of hope has the strongest link.

Most recently, we've been doing some experimental work (as have some others) on interventions that increase or provide hope for very poor respondents in Latin America and Africa. The findings seem to be that the provision of hope for people who have limited reason to have hope seems to change their outlook and often their behavior and then their trajectory. So, it's not a magic bullet, but it's very clear that lack of hope and desperation are linked to bad outcomes. We're seeing the worst kind of that outcome in terms of the opioid crisis and mortality rate crisis.

The White House commission that's looking at the opioid crisis has asked the president to declare this a national emergency. It is a problem. One thing that you found was that working-class whites report more physical pain than their peers of color. Is it too much of a leap to say that this might be a factor in why opioid addiction is a particular scourge among working-class white Americans?

The crisis is a sort of perfect storm in that there is a crisis of work among working-class white Americans. If you look at the places where their jobs were most stable -- locationally and industrially -- it was the Heartland, it was coal mines and car manufacturing. These are typically heavy labor, blue-collar jobs that often come with injuries or long-term effects on backs and knees and other things. Those are the industries that are being hollowed out, both by technology-driven growth and some by import competition but really mainly by technology-driven growth.

So, in the same places where you have a lot of people who are losing their prospects of future employment, and their kids are as well, you have a lot of people who are on disability insurance and have lots of job-related chronic illnesses and do report a lot of pain. Opioids in this country are prescribed very easily. We have the highest per capita consumption in the world of opioids, which is pretty remarkable. So, pain seems to be a gateway both to opioids and then, when opioids run out, people often switch to available black market synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which are deadly. There's a link from pain to opioids to overdose and suicide. That's part of it.

The other part of the story -- which seems to resonate with the higher levels of resilience stories -- is that just in general, whites report more pain than blacks or Hispanics. If you look across low-income whites, rural whites are more likely to report pain than urban poor whites. That probably has to do with the kind of work they do and their likelihood of being injured or having chronic back injuries or other sorts of similar injuries. If you look at a map of disability insurance, it matches these patterns, locationally and cohort-wise.

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Were you able to factor out the possibility of any cultural difference that might make whites more likely to acknowledge physical pain than their peers of color? That people don't complain at the same levels necessarily?

I found that everywhere. For example, if you're looking at data on health and poverty across a range of poor countries and you use days of missed work as an indicator of ill health, you don't find anything on poor people because they go to work when they're sick.

Part of the resilience story is clearly that minorities, in different ways, seem to have stronger levels of family and community support. This plays out slightly differently across the groups. But somebody to rely on when you're in need -- that may be a coping mechanism, a quite effective one. It just may be more acceptable for whites to report more pain. Maybe they're more likely to go to the doctor and report pain, and therefore, get opioids. That's another possibility, but our data is simply on reported pain in the Gallup surveys, and it demonstrates that pattern as well.

This Q&A is condensed from a recent episode of Think. You can listen to the full episode at kera.org/think. Krys Boyd can be contacted at think@kera.org.

Carol Graham is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.